According to research by anti-food waste organisation Wrap, 680,000 tonnes of "avoidable" bakery waste is disposed of each year at a cost of £1.1bn, about 80% of it from packs that have been opened but not finished.

"Freegan" Mark Boyle sees plenty of bread in rubbish bins when looking for free food, and thinks people have lost touch with the bread-making process.

"If you make something yourself, you've spent half an hour kneading the bread and then baking it, you don't waste that bread because you know how much energy you've put into it," he says.

"But if you can pick up a loaf of bread for about 20p at the end of a day from a supermarket... then you don't have the same respect for what you're consuming."

So-called "rag-pickers" in Paris in the 1880s never wasted any bread scraps - they ate any clean bread they were given or sold it on to tradespeople, and used dirty bread to feed animals or as breadcrumbs that were sold back to restaurants.

But these days people do not go to such lengths to use up every crumb. Chris Young from the Real Bread Campaign believes the price of white sandwich loaf, known as Chorleywood bread, (which accounts for 80% of the UK's bread) is what has eroded respect for bread.

"Every time you go [through rubbish] there's different things in the bin, but bread definitely is the number one," he says.

"You could probably feed a huge amount of people from one bin at a supermarket for an evening or two evenings if the bread kept."

As well as buying too much, Wrap says keeping bread in the fridge is one of the reasons so much is thrown away.

Mark Newman says: "The worst thing you can do is put it in the fridge - at 5C it goes stale very quickly. But you can refresh bread by splashing it with a bit of cold water and reheating it, it will bring the crust back to life."

He recommends trying sourdough, which keeps for up to a week, or using a bread bin or cloth bag to keep bread.

Another way to reduce wastage is to freeze bread - so why are people not doing that?

Ian Bowles says: "People do have this perception that when you freeze bread you're not going to get the same quality of freshness.

"If you've got a lot of bread left over, then you can just freeze it."

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